I support first cousin marriage, but nothing closer.

I support second cousin marriage, but nothing closer.

I do not support legal marriage.

I think we should. I mean, I think it would be out of line if, in the same-sex marriage thread, a lack of consent was brought up as why no form could be allowed. Or indeed, regular marriage, for that matter. Although there is good reason to be concerned about abuse in family situations, simply because children make for easy victims, I think the discussion of the legality should be actually consanguineous marriages, and not marriages without consent, which already aren't allowed and are more of a separate topic.

Yeah but the difference is in the nature of familial relationships. In particular, I think there IS warrant for a strong presumption of a lack of consent when it comes to parents and children marrying.

I mean this is like saying sex and age are a separate thing--statutory rape exists because we presume a lack of consent for minors, even if it's different on the margins. I think similarly, adult-aged children marrying their parents ought to be presumed to be a product of a questionable upbringing.

Yeah, everybody knows that you can't marry closer than second cousins 'cause you'll get babies with nine heads.

Not to joke, but in the Ozarks, where first cousins marrying first cousins or closer blood relative has led to a lot of really bad birth defects becoming embedded in the family line. I mean really scary birth defects, too.

Jello, firstly, there are situations emerging more now where parents are meeting their fully grown children they've not seen (be it due to divorce, one night stands, what have you) and building relationships. Not many, but they happen. And in those cases, I'd think that's certainly not an issue.

To speak more generally to the majority of cases... I don't think "questionable upbringing" should remain a factor at the point that an adult can consent. I mean, there are a LOT of marriages that are bad ideas, often involving things like domestic abuse, which trace back to questionable upbringing, but we don't shut those down en masse. I would say the point that would be of concern would be the states that allow lower ages for marriage with parental consent, and I think in those cases, there should be an adjustment made.

Is the main point of marriage to produce children. No, it is to allow two people who want to spend their lives together to have a legally binding contract. Children are merely the biological result. If that sounds cold and clinical, that's what my mother told me when I asked her if she got married to have kids. I was like, seven at the time.

So was I. We're not running a test to see if someone's entering a marriage they shouldn't be because they were abused in the past and are still a victim. That's not limited to incestuous situations.

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We're also not running tests over whether or not people are mature enough to consent to sex. What does that have to do with presumptions, which a law has to do in order to have a general application to everybody?

So was I. We're not running a test to see if someone's entering a marriage they shouldn't be because they were abused in the past and are still a victim. That's not limited to incestuous situations.

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No, but what is limited to incestuous situations is the way legalized consanguineous marriages would allow for people to rear sexual partners from birth. One the one hand, you are discussing people who have agency, even if their judgment is influenced by past trauma. On the other you have people who are in the hands of someone that controlled literally every aspect of their life for years on end, and thereby may have steered or coerced the offspring into a "relationship" in a way that doesn't even have any parallels in other contexts.

So was I. We're not running a test to see if someone's entering a marriage they shouldn't be because they were abused in the past and are still a victim. That's not limited to incestuous situations.

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We're also not running tests over whether or not people are mature enough to consent to sex. What does that have to do with presumptions, which a law has to do in order to have a general application to everybody?

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What we're advocating here isn't a law. It's a lack of law. If anything, I think it's the anti-consanguineous marriage folk who have to explain their presumptions behind outlawing the relationship for all couples.

Yes, and the form of argument you chose to make against the law was "it uses assumptions that don't apply 100% of the time."

That's dumb. Some people have built up a tolerance to alcohol such that they are relatively unimpaired at the legal limit for a blood alcohol level. Does that mean we should just throw out all the laws against drunk driving, then?

That's... what I'm doing? I'm saying that laws operate under presumptions because you can't tailor a law based on every single little special flower out there--they have to have a general application.

Just because some 14 year olds might be wise beyond their age doesn't mean that we should do away with a law of general application that presumes that people under the age of consent in a particular state cannot consent. The existence of that law is NOT--as Lowie seems to suggest it ought to--dependent on individualized tests of sexual maturity.

Jabba-wocky
I don't think DUI laws are a good analogy because one applies to majorities and the other applies to a minority. What percentage of people pose a threat to others when they try to drive a car while over the blood alcohol limit set by law? Probably a sizeable majority. What percentage of the set of all people who could potentially marry a blood relative are abusive parents who have brainwashed their child so severely that even by the age of 18, the child won't be able to break free of that influence enough to make their own choice about a marriage? Nonzero, but hopefully a fairly small minority. A parent-child marriage is the most disturbing subset of the general body of potential marriages we're discussing, so it works well for purposes of debate, but it's not the only subset. I'd say if you want to make an analogy to alcohol, a better one might be to the mere legality of alcohol for purchase. Some people do terrible things under the influence of alcohol, but there are also plenty of people who don't. It's the job of social workers and other such personnel to try to handle the problem cases and prevent the bad things from happening. It's not the job of government to legislate anyone out of the right to buy alcohol as a way of preemptively stopping any of those bad things from happening.

GrandAdmiralJello
Let me clarify... I think we're using similar reasoning but approaching this from differing baselines. You're coming from the point of view that the default should be consanguineous marriage is not allowed and we shouldn't alter that state because some blood relatives could potentially have healthy marriages. I'm coming from the point of view that the default should always be if adults can enter into a contract, they can enter into a contract, and disallowing consanguineous marriage is a flip of the switch from default solely because some blood relatives could potentially have damaging marriages. But in either case, it's the proponents of flipping a switch who should have to explain their justification, ie. we are arguing the same thing from different philosophies of government.